….LET
the farmer, so far as I am concerned, be damned
forevermore. To Hell with him, and bad luck to
him. He is a tedious fraud and ignoramus, a
cheap rogue and hypocrite, the eternal Jack of
the human pack. He deserves all that he ever
suffers under our economic system, and more. Any
city man, not insane, who sheds tears for him is
shedding tears of the crocodile.

No
more grasping, selfish and dishonest mammal,
indeed, is known to students of the Anthropoidea.
When the going is good for him he robs the rest
of us up to the extreme limit of our endurance;
when the going is bad be comes bawling for help
out of the public till. Has anyone ever heard of
a farmer making any sacrifice of his own
interests, however slight, to the common good?
Has anyone ever heard of a farmer practising or
advocating any political idea that was not
absolutely self-seeking–that was not, in fact,
deliberately designed to loot the rest of us to
his gain? Greenbackism, free silver, the
government guarantee of prices, bonuses, all the
complex fiscal imbecilities of the cow State
John Baptists–these are the contributions of
the virtuous husbandmen to American political
theory. There has never been a time, in good
seasons or bad, when his hands were not itching
for more; there has never been a time when he
was not ready to support any charlatan, however
grotesque, who promised to get it for him. Only
one issue ever fetches him, and that is the
issue of his own profit. He must be promised
something definite and valuable, to be paid to
him alone, or he is off after some other
mountebank. He simply cannot imagine himself as
a citizen of a commonwealth, in duty bound to
give as well as take; he can imagine himself
only as getting all and giving nothing.

Yet
we are asked to venerate this prehensile moron
as the Ur-burgher, the citizen par
excellence, the foundation-stone of the
state! And why? Because he produces something
that all of us must have–that we must get
somehow on penalty of death. And how do we get
it from him? By submitting helplessly to his
unconscionable blackmailing by paying him, not
under any rule of reason, but in proportion to
his roguery and incompetence, and hence to the
direness of our need. I doubt that the human
race, as a whole, would submit to that sort of
high-jacking, year in and year out, from any
other necessary class of men. But the farmers
carry it on incessantly, without challenge or
reprisal, and the only thing that keeps them
from reducing us, at intervals, to actual famine
is their own imbecile knavery. They are all
willing and eager to pillage us by starving us,
but they can’t do it because they can’t
resist attempts to swindle each other. Recall,
for example, the case of the cottongrowers in
the South. Back in the 1920’s they agreed
among themselves to cut down the cotton acreage
in order to inflate the price–and instantly
every party to the agreement began planting more
cotton in order to profit by the abstinence of
his neighbors. That abstinence being wholly
imaginary, the price of cotton fell instead of
going up –and then the entire pack of
scoundrels began demanding assistance from the
national treasury–in brief, began demanding
that the rest of us indemnify them for the
failure of their plot to blackmail us.

The
same demand is made sempiternally by the wheat
farmers of the Middle West. It is the theory of
the zanies who perform at Washington that a
grower of wheat devotes himself to that banal
art in a philanthropic and patriotic
spirit–that he plants and harvests his crop in
order that the folks of the cities may not go
without bread. It is the plain fact that he
raises wheat because it takes less labor than
any other crop–because it enables him, after
working no more than sixty days a year, to loaf
the rest of the twelve months. If wheat-raising
could be taken out of the hands of such lazy fellahin
and organized as the production of iron or
cement is organized, the price might be reduced
by two-thirds, and still leave a large profit
for entrepreneurs. But what would become
of the farmers? Well, what rational man gives a
hoot? If wheat went to $10 a bushel tomorrow,
and all the workmen of the cities became slaves
in name as well as in fact, no farmer in this
grand land of freedom would consent voluntarily
to a reduction of as much as 1/8 of a cent a
bushel. "The greatest wolves," said E.
W. Howe, a graduate of the farm, "are the
farmers who bring produce to town to sell."
Wolves? Let us not insult Canis lupus I
move the substitution of Hyæna hyæna.